And Chicano artist Adrian Esparza knows the purple and orange of the Mexican serape: His "One and the Same" is a Minimalist color-field wall hanging, constructed from the raveled yarn of a Mexican blanket, that would be comfortable shown with the boxes of Donald Judd or the drawings of Sol LeWitt.

There was a time when being a Chicano artist meant creating images of campesinos in the lettuce fields or vatos in lowriders. It was art with a fist held in the air, demanding justice and equality.

But Esparza is part of a new chapter in a familiar story: how art of cultural identity grows, from an initial inward-turning desire to assert a separate identity and demand validation for it, to eventually turning outward to join the rest of the world. His art is mainstream, but it is still Chicano culture at its root; it is the culture he knows.

National, local shows

That is the lesson of two new and related shows at Phoenix Art Museum. One is a national show, curated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, called "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement," and the other is "Locals Only," put together by Phoenix Art Museum and featuring Valley artists who are part of the same cultural dynamic.

The national show features 120 works by 32 artists of Chicano heritage who have entered the mainstream of contemporary art. The local show includes 27 works by a dozen artists.

"We thought it would be a misstep to show 'Phantom Sightings' here without a local presence," says Sara Cochran, curator of contemporary art at Phoenix Art Museum.

So, the second show includes works by Annie Lopez, Claudio Dicochea, Fausto Fernandez and Hector Ruiz, among others.

"The shows focus on the emerging generation of artists from across the United States," Cochran says. "The work is obviously informed by the historical context and experiences of the Chicano movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s but is not bound by them."

Sloganeering over

The anger and political fervor of the earlier generation of Chicano art has dissipated. The T-shirt slogans and street theater of the old days has given way to video art, installations and performance art, within the wider framework of contemporary art.

"The artists engage local and global politics, mix high and low cultures and sample legitimate and bootlegged sources - but they often do so within a conceptual framework that has been driven by the larger issues and trends that have broadly influenced contemporary art today," Cochran says.

Thirty-four years ago, the Los Angeles museum held a coming-out party for the young Chicano-art movement. That show, "Chicanismo en el Arte," was a glorious assertion of cultural identity and independence. It was art that held its fist in the air and declared Chicano pride.

But things have changed drastically since then.

In 1981, artist Harry Gamboa Jr. described Chicanos as a "phantom culture" within the American mainstream. They were invisible to most of us. Not anymore.

In 1970, there were 9.6 million Hispanics in the U.S., according to Census Bureau figures. Today, there are 47 million. And Maricopa County is second only to Los Angeles County nationwide in the increase in Hispanic population from 2000 to 2006.

The increase in population alone has made Mexican and Hispanic culture more prominent. Grocery stores carry tortillas and fresh salsa. Even in Iowa, they know what pico de gallo is. The taco is as American as spaghetti.

Art more conceptual

As a result, Chicano artists no longer need to plead for a place in the sun - daylight shines brightly on them.

And now the older art and anger have been subsumed in the larger issues of art, art that's largely conceptual.

"An active culture is never fixed, but is in an endless flux," Houston artist Delilah Montoya says. "By the '90s, Chicano affirmation was already a historic artifact. But this new show demonstrates how that movement influenced the next generation.

"They were important to us then, but we no longer have to be incubated, and after them, it has become easier to look out at the world with your own voice."

That's what we see in both shows.

"We all have to deal with identity," Dicochea says. "We all have to check a box at the DMV.

"And in the 1970s, in the civil-rights movement, it was important to declare ourselves, to make ourselves visible. But the problem is, if you are too vested in establishing a cultural essence, you run the risk of making it seem like your identity is fixed, and identity is never fixed. It should be organic; that is, it changes. We are not the same person we were when we were 5."

So, many of the younger artists have avoided the symbols and stereotypes of earlier Chicano art.

"There is some stereotypical Chicano stuff," Ruiz says. "The Virgin of Guadalupe and lowriders, but that is not a huge part of my life and doesn't inspire me or anything."

"We're all individuals"

The Chicano art of the early years was about closing a circle around a beleaguered demographic, to find a certain solidarity. But to a younger generation, such uniformity feels constricting.

"I've got brown skin, but you can see that from my name," Lopez says. "People expect me to be a certain way, but I'm not. We're all individuals.

"In the beginning, it was always about identity, but it's different now. That whole Chicano thing for me was just a T-shirt. You're not brown because you create art that looks a certain way. Look, we don't have to be that way anymore."

Lopez creates cyanotype photographs that make fun of the cliche imagery, and he has a series in the museum show that pokes fun at the marginalization of Chicano art in the museum world.

Ruiz makes wood sculpture inspired by folk art.

"I'm inspired by folk artists, but also by German Expressionists and the art of the insane," he says. "I just identify being a contemporary artist."

The shift in emphasis over the decades is similar to that in other fields of art. Native American art used to be about painting Indians. But the younger generation, including Steve Yazzie of Phoenix, feels free to make art out of anything.

Constant evolution

African-American art and Feminist art also used to be more specifically about race or gender injustice.

"In Feminism, you can see the difference between first-wave and fourth-wave Feminism," Dicochea says. "It's much more complex community and can be in conversation with the rest of the world. These are not communities living in the past, but are alive and breathing."

Or, as Fernandez puts it, "I eat Chinese food and pizza."

The difference now is that instead of proclaiming Chicano identity - "Look at me, I'm here" - the identity has become a sensibility turned outward to view the rest of the world. The artists see a global community through the lens of being Chicano. It has become a tool, rather than a subject for the art.

"There are two ways to interpret what we might call 'post-Chicano art,' " Cochran says. "One is to say that Chicano art is over and done with as a separate movement and has been accepted into the mainstream.

"But the other way to see it is that being Chicano, they have an extra vocabulary, an ability to tap into certain ways of thinking which enriches the conceptual approach to art and moves it to another level."

Chicano continuity

That means the Chicano sensibility has continuity. There are certain things you can see in the new art that remain essentially Chicano.

• A blurring of the lines between high culture and low culture.

• A tendency to satire.

• The use of folk- and pop-culture motifs.

• Bright colors.

• The mixing of cultures, i.e., "Spanglish."

• An emphasis on community and family.

• An awareness of "border" issues.

• A love of extreme detail and ornament, which is a modern version of the Churrigueresque style in Colonial Mexico.

• And "rasquachismo," or the playful reuse of found objects and discarded items.

You can find examples of all these tendencies in both shows. You can see the satire in Lopez, the pop motifs in the sculpture of Gary Garay, the Day-Glo pink in the amorphous constructions of Victor Estrada.

The rasquache aesthetic is key to the fabric-and-vinyl cars pieced together by Margarita Cabrera. Family is central to the photographs of Christina Fernandez's photographs of herself dressed up as her mother, and Carlee Fernandez's portrait of herself dressed as her father.

And the border is the subject of Montoya's 6-foot-wide panoramas of the Arizona desert of border crossings.

The range of work in the show is broad, some more obviously Chicano than others, but all the artists assume a freedom that the earlier generation did not feel it could afford.

And, like the awareness of the border, it isn't so much the artists who have changed as our perception of them.

As Montoya says of the change, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us."